2-995-758 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

The Review by Her Majesty of Rifle Volunteers at Edinburgh: view looking towards Arthur's Seat and Salisbury Crags, 1860. From a sketch by B. Clayton. 'Looking beyond the crowd to the highest point of Salisbury Crags, away to the extreme right your eye rests immediately with pleasure on some military tents whose light and airy look of snowy whiteness, gleaming in the sunshine, at once gets effect from and gives it to the foreground, dark with the dense mass of human figures. As you turn your gaze for a yet more extensive range you behold far up on the very peak of Arthur's Seat, in solitary glory, the Scottish standard floating magnificently to the breeze, as if proudly conscious of the occasion and the scene. Whilst over all there stretches a noble canopy brilliant with the ever-shifting splendours of a fine autumnal sky...The vast and varied gathering could not be estimated at less than 200,000 persons...There were about 150 different corps on the ground, marshalled into thirty-five battalions - one of Mounted Rifles, six of Artillery, one of Engineers, and twenty-seven of Rifles'. From "Illustrated London News", 1860.